


Spiders Search for my Heart

by shortzendaya (orphan_account)



Series: What is Normal for the Spider, is Chaos for the Fly [1]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel
Genre: <- alluded to, Also the non/con is just mentioned w/mentions of child pornography, Anorexic Natasha Romanov, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, Clint is actually sort of useless in this so sorry to the BAMF Clint fans it doesn't happen in this, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, It's not super Clint/Nat, Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, but still icky, so it's not explicit, with some self-hate/fat-shaming so if you're sensitive to that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27356122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/shortzendaya
Summary: “You’re a person, I don’t believe all people can change but I believe that people like you-like us can change. I have to,”“Maybe we don't need to change, just revert,” She muses.He looks at her, “I don’t believe in original sin,” She says.Natasha's first year at SHIELD
Relationships: Clint Barton & Maria Hill, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Nick Fury & Maria Hill
Series: What is Normal for the Spider, is Chaos for the Fly [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1997923
Kudos: 15





	Spiders Search for my Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Hello :)
> 
> I don't think I have much to say here except content warnings are in the tags and I hope you enjoy!

Clint was waiting outside of the door. The ambassador had been in the room for 5 minutes when he heard muffled shouting and a body dropping onto the floor. He waits a few more seconds before hearing the click-clack of high heels on a marble floor. 

The woman who pushes open the door does not look at him at first, her face obscured by her bouncy curls, done in an anachronistic style that reminds Clint of Marylyn Monroe. But where Marylyn was all soft curves, this woman is sharp. 

She starts to walk away from him when she stops and turns back to look at him. She is severe. Angry and focused, but made of soft lips and rosy cheeks. She rolls her eyes and slips the thumb drive into the neckline of her dress. It is gold, shimmery, the contrast between the rich warmth of the dress than her cold pale skin and platinum hair makes Clint feel dizzy. 

She waves her hand in a ‘hurry up’ motion and Clint charges her. She side-steps him, grabbing hold of his wrist, and kicks his knee in from behind. He drops onto the floor on his knees, his wrist gripped unnaturally tight in her soft hand. She rotates her feet so his back was to her and toes it forwards causing his torso to drop down and his shoulder joint to grind uncomfortably. 

“Who do you work for?” she asks in perfect American English, no accent. 

Clint tries to rotate his head to look back at her, “I’m a free agent,” true enough, he wasn’t exactly supposed to be here. In fact, he’d been explicitly told not to come here by his boss. But, semantics. 

“You’re lying.” 

Fuck. “No, I’m here on my own. I think it’s wrong to distribute that stuff,” Clint squeaks.

“Well, now I can tell you’re _really_ lying,” she laughs.

Behind them comes a click. “ _Blyad,_ ” the woman swears under her breath, she drops Clint’s wrist and raises her hands in the air slowly turning around. “P-please help,” she whimpered, “He tried to t-touch me,” 

The man holding the gun was wearing a suit and had an earpiece. “Sure, agapiménos,” he smirked. His voice heavily accented in Greek. He starts to say something into his earpiece in greek when the woman raises an arm in front of her, pointing at him, the golden cuffs on her wrist clinking softly, and an electrical charge shoots out causing the man in the suit to convulse violently before dropping on the floor.  
She walks over to his body and rips out his earpiece. Grimacing, she rubs it on her dress before putting it in her ear. She listens intently as garbled greek yelling comes through the speaker. The woman sighs and clears her throat, in a terrible rendition of a man’s voice (but perfect greek), she speaks into the earpiece.

More garbled Greek comes through the speaker in response, she frowns and looks at Clint, who had gotten up from the floor and was only slightly offended that she hadn’t been worried he’d attack her. “Do you know their codeword?” he shakes his head, she sighs.

“Fuck.”

More Greek shouting from the headpiece, more frantic this time. She crouches back down to the man on the floor and pats him down, looking for a weapon. Her face brightens when she feels metal tucked into the waist of his pants and she pulls out a gun. She considers the man and clicks open a compartment on her belt, which Clint hadn’t noticed as it was nearly the exact same color as her dress. It was a 60’s style ring belt, but some of the rings were solid circlets which, apparently, stored things inside them. Like a small dagger, which she took from the compartment and uses to slit the man’s throat.

“Oh,” Clint gasps. 

She raises an eyebrow at him, “You want to get out of here alive, yes? come with me,” 

Clint laughs “Very terminator of you,”.

She motions for him to follow her through a doorway that leads from their little hallway and into a marble stairwell because of course, everything in this stupid villa has to be marble. And gold. And gorgeous. Including this very hot, very intimidating spy. Cling is trying not to think about it. The super-hot super-spy grabs a marble bust that decorates the landing of the stairwell (Rich people will put a marble bust anywhere and _everywhere_ ), peers over the stairwell and said “I’ve never seen that one,” she drops the bust down the spiral and it lands, not with the noise you would expect, but with a muffled ‘crrk’. Something has intercepted it. That something being a human torso.

“What?” Clint asks, only slightly in shock. “The Terminator,” she responds, “I’ve never seen that film,” below them muffled angry Greek shouting, and subsequent angry Greek stomping up the stairs, interrupts their conversation. The woman cracks her neck (In the way that all badasses do when they’re going to do something badass) before launching herself over the railing in a surprisingly graceful freefall, which is broken by three bodyguard’s bodies and several loud cracks of bone. Or marble. Or both. 

The woman pushes her hair out of her face and gets to work on the rest of the guys who are charging her, taking a running start down the stairs and leaping onto the next guy’s shoulder, her legs wrapping tightly around his neck and her torso swinging around him. 

The telltale crack of a neck being broken comes and she falls into the next man with purpose, her back hitting his chest and her hands coming to either side of his neck, as her feet hit the floor she flips his body over her shoulder and he screams as his spine hits the marble. She tazes the next man with her bracelet and holds him up in front of her as a shield while she shoots the next faceless bodyguard. Well, not as a shield but more of a silencer, with the gun held to the man’s back and the bullet tearing through his organs muffling the crack of a bullet through air. 

She takes down several more men with this method and had clears the area that the stairway leads to by the time Clint comes down the stairs (Running, as it turns out, is not as fast as falling). “You, uh, really handled those guys, huh,”

She looks at him blankly, “Yes.”

“Hey, why haven’t you killed me yet?” Clint asks. Which, for future reference, is just an incredibly stupid thing to say to someone you just saw kill, like, 7 men. Don’t be like Clint.

She smiles, “We are both Americans, yes? We’ve got to look out for our own,”

This does not sound like the mindset of any American Clint knows.

He hesitates, “...Oh, cool.”

“My car is parked in the lot, I can drop you off somewhere less incriminating,” she offers, gesturing to the trail of dead bodies leading up the stairwell.

“Sure, sure. That sounds-uh great,” 

She leads him through another doorway onto a veranda, which they hop over onto the grass. Staying close to the shadows they walk to the villa’s large parking lot. She takes a key out of her belt and opens a nice car, some 60s Jaguar by the looks of it. Clint cautiously opens the door. He is getting a bad feeling about this. He presses one of the buttons on his hearing aid, the one he should’ve pressed the second he saw some sexy murder lady walk out of the ambassador’s office with a single drop of blood on her cheek, a fact that only really sets in now because it has so many neighbors. He slides into the seat and tries to seem relaxed as the woman turns on the radio and some weird song in Russian or something like that crackles into his ears.

_Topot_

“So are you CIA, Homeland, whatever?” Clint asks, his hands getting clammy.

_Topot_

“That’s classified.” She laughs.

_Topot_

“You can just drop me at the nearest phone booth,” more pleading than a suggestion.

_Kopyt._

“This song is about soldiers dying in war, sacrificing themselves for the good of their country.”

_Rys'yu, rys'yu_

“Neat,” he gulps. The woman is driving them into the middle of nowhere.

 _“Vsadnik letit.”_ She sings along under her breath

Clint taps the button on his hearing aid twice more, for insurance;

 _“S polya boya vyshel odin.”_ Her voice is quiet and wavering. Not perfect but good enough. An odd bit of humanity under all of her perfection.

 _“Svishchut puli, znamya na-”_ the car lurches forward and the woman knocks her head on the steering wheel. The front of the car has crumpled. The woman wipes the blood that is seeping from her wound off of her forehead. It has stained one of her bouncy blonde curls red. 

She opens the car door violently, the hinge squeaking against the strain. It must have been damaged in the crash. They are on a long stretch of empty road bordered by woods on two sides. There is nothing in front of them that they could’ve crashed into. Clint gets out of the car and sends a quiet thanks to his guardian angel. His guardian angel shoots the woman in gold. 

She gasps as blood soaks through her dress above her right breast. Maria Hill emerges from the nothingness and shoots the woman again, this time in her upper-right arm. 

The woman barely reacts beyond a few haggard breaths and her scowl deepening. She lifts both of her arms, aiming one at Maria and one at Clint, a look of confusion crosses Maria's face before her eyes widened in realization and she takes another shot, this time tearing through the woman’s hand. Bone and tendons shredded. She has a hole directly in the center of her palm. This sets the woman off.

She charges Maria, Maria shoots her again. She disarms Maria, tosses the gun aside, and grabs her neck. She throws Marie onto the ground, Maria landing on her knees, the woman kicks Maria’s chin with her high heel, skin breaking and Maria’s head landing on the ground. Maria is fighting back, trashing and grabbing but she isn’t doing it hard enough, the woman has one foot on Maria’s chest, heel digging into her sternum, the other is coming down onto her face, making a bloody mess of it. 

Another gunshot. The bullet lands in the woman’s chest. Her lung. She pays no mind. She keeps going until she can’t anymore. Until she has forgotten how to breathe,  
wheezing and sobbing, face turning blue, contrasting with the newly died red of her hair and dress.

\-----------------------

Natalya wakes all at once. But she knows better than to start with the dramatics, the gasping, tearing out IVs. She takes stock of her surroundings as well as she can, she’s been intubated, she has several drips, saline, probably, some painkiller, morphine, maybe, some kind of restraint too. Someone else in the room. Doctor, hopefully. She stays still. The doctor checks some chart and leaves and she opens her eyes. Restraints are cloth. Simple enough. Intubation must be dealt with. She grimaces (As well as someone with a giant tube stuck down their throat, forcing their mouth open can grimace). Natalya strains against her restraints until the taut fabric snaps. She reaches up to the tube, takes a deep breath, and pulls it out. It takes several pulls and she coughs up a chunk of blood and mucous, so that’s fun. She takes a moment to inspect her wounds, or what’s left of them. Her hand has been reconstructed but still aches, how they found an anesthetic that would work is beyond her. Her other wounds have closed over, it’s been about 3 days then. 

Long enough to decode the secrets that are in her DNA. 

Not like some cheesy spy movie where she has, like, missile codes in her cell structure, Natalya is a living experiment. 

She swings her legs over the side of the bed and pulls out her IVs. The morphine didn’t do anything besides make her head a bit foggy, not that there was any real pain for it to treat. She stands, her legs wavering slightly. Hospital gown must be dealt with, how does one get a doctor or nurse to unofficially enter a room. She sighs and looks at the IVs, it’s simple, yes, but could be effective. She knocks the three IV poles over, the metal clattering on the linoleum floor, bags bursting. She waits against the wall by the door until a well-meaning nurse walks through. She is stabbed in the neck with a pen and bleeds out on the floor. But not before Natalya can get her scrubs. 

She walks out the door, the nurse’s stupid shoes squeak on the floor. She is in a fairly basic white hallway, just like any hospital, except it’s entirely empty. Interesting, hopefully not a sign of this being a higher security wing, Natalya could use a win right now. She hears talking and walks the other way to a right turn in the hallway, and ducks behind it. It’s a woman and a man.

“She’s like a fucking berserker, I mean you saw that. That’s inhuman pain tolerance,” the woman says.

“Okay, but she’s American, wouldn’t we know if the US was using the super-serum?” the man replies, it’s the man from the villa, the incompetent American. 

So they know she’s enhanced. That complicates things. Her DNA is in their system, she doesn’t even know what organization this is and now they’ve uncovered one of _Rossiya’s_ biggest secrets. She’s made quite a mess of this. 

“I mean, we would if they documented it. Which is unlikely, this is the kind of thing people don’t want getting out,” 

If she just escapes then maybe Madame B can get a specialist to wipe it from their system. Again, if she knew what agency this was. 

Well, might as well kill these two.

She jumps out from behind the corner. Turns out the woman is the fucking _suka_ who shot her. So she’s going to _blya umeret’_. Painfully. 

The woman swears when she sees Natalya, and starts to reach for her gun. 

Natalya runs forward, grabs the woman’s arm, and swings her into the wall of the hallway. The woman stands back up, legs trembling slightly, and Natalya kicks her square in the stomach, back into the wall. The woman grunts and Natalya turns her attention to the man. He’s charging her. He gets a hit on her face. Lucky shot. Natalya grabs the offending arm and twists it so their positions change, his back is to her again. He uses this position and her tight grip to flip her over his shoulder, the air knocking out of her lungs. 

She gasps for air but can’t quite get it. As she continues to gasp she keeps fighting, knocking Clint on the side of the head. She pushes him down onto the floor and kicks him in his stomach repeatedly, he grabs hold of her leg and the loss of momentum causes her to land on her ass. She crawls over to him and punched him in the face.

She hated these fucking Americans. She keeps punching. His face is bloody, his nose not broken but getting there. He isn’t fighting back anymore. She turns her attention to the woman who has now gotten up and is speaking into an earpiece. More guards, great. Natalya kicks her on the side of the head. The woman goes down and Natalya takes her gun. She shoots her through the stomach. Intensely painful, slow, and immobilizing.

“M’ria,” The man on the floor chokes out, blood running down the back of his throat. 

Then, the reinforcements come. 20 or so agents, all in the same black and white bodysuits. At least now she knew they were SHIELD. Why SHIELD would have an interest in what was on the thumb drive she didn't know. Didn’t care.

She doesn’t remember much about that fight, she remembers breaking an agent’s neck, another agent breaking her nose with the butt of their gun in retaliation, someone tugging on her hair, and the doctor who injected her with a sedative.

It wears off almost immediately after the door to her cell is closed. It’s small and cold. One of the walls is entirely one-way mirror. No privacy. She has a cot, a slit in one of the walls where food comes through, and a toilet blocked off by a half-wall. 

She is still wearing the nurse’s scrubs, though they are stained in blood. Her’s and others. Her nose has been set, and the few bruises she’d gotten in the fight are healing.

“I’ve really fucked this up,” she says to herself, the words bouncing back to her off the concrete walls. Not killing the oafish American the moment she saw him was her first mistake, not killing him the moment he got in her car was her second, not killing that terrible woman had been her third. Since she’s been taken into SHIELD custody she’s made too many mistakes to count.

She thinks about her options, she could kill herself. They don’t make that particularly easy, bashing one's brains out on a toilet or wall isn’t exactly fun. She could try to escape, she can’t even see the seam for the door and she can’t very well shrink. She could defect. 

No. She can’t.

She waits there for a while, she can’t be sure, she tries to keep track of the hours in her head but she’s never had a good internal clock. Probably because she barely left the house as a child and sunset in rural Russia happens halfway through a day.

She stands up, off the cot, and decides to calm her mind. She sits on the cold concrete and stretches her legs, they ache ever so slightly and she sighs in satisfaction as she pushes herself. She hasn’t had a quiet moment in so long. She’d prefer it was at home. She goes to bed.

She wakes when food is slid through the slot. She inspects it; apple slices and a microwave chicken pot pie. The lap of luxury. She eats the apple slices. Picks through the chicken pot pie to get the chicken and peas. She rubs the gravy off. She has no need for empty carbs and fat. She stretches again. Does some basic ballet to feel something familiar, arabesque feels like home, and in développé she finds her ‘sisters’. 

She sleeps and wakes again. This time she is woken by the sound of knocking on glass. She jolts awake. There is a man in her room. 

“If you try to rape me I will kill you, you see what I’ve done to your agents,” She threatens, holding a hand out in front of her.

“Uh. Behind glass so no need to worry about...that,” The man replies. He’s right, she can’t believe she missed that. Stupid. It’s the man from Greece. And the hallway. 

She relaxes in her bed, sitting with her legs crossed. “If you’re here for information you won’t get any.”

“Okay, then I’ll just talk. You’re Russian, right? I heard you talk in Russian at the mansion and you were singing along to that song,”

She stares at him.

“No response? Cool, cool. Well, you’re a pretty good fighter,” He huffs goodheartedly, “I’ll say,” he continues, gesturing at his face. Most of it is covered in bruises, he has a black eye that’s almost completely swollen shut, a busted lip, and a splinted nose with a bandage atop it.

“How many days has it been since Greece?” Natalya asks.

The man brightens, “Five, I think? It’s hard to tell what with jet-lag and all that,”

She nods.

“You’re enhanced.” He says.

There’s no denying it. She nods.

“With Captain America’s super serum,” He tells her. 

“A variant, but yes,” She replies. She probably should not have said that.

“Yeah, I noticed that. You’re not exactly strapping,” He jokes, flexing his arms in front of his chest. She stays silent. “Why would they alter the serum? It worked perfectly the first time,”

“ _They,_ don’t need another Captain America. I serve a different purpose,” Was there something in that pie? Christ, Natalya.

“And who is ‘they’” He asks with a smirk. Natalya thinks who she wants to blame, “If I tell you will you release me to them? They are your government, after all.”

“SHIELD is an extra-governmental organization,”

“I’m not talking about SHIELD. _Your_ government.”

“The Ohio state government?”

God, he’s annoying.

“God, you’re annoying. I have no interest in speaking to you anymore,”

Clint laughs. “Did I kill that woman, in the hallway?” Natalya asks.

Clint tenses, his jaw setting. “Maria is alive,” He spits.

Natalya sighs dramatically, “Better luck next time, I suppose.”

\-----------------------

It’s been a week. Maria is out of the infirmary and pissed. She’s also pretty sure that the woman she apprehended, the woman who shot her and landed her in the infirmary, is the Black Widow. She tells Clint this. Clint tells her “The Black Widow isn’t real, that’s just what dudes say when they don’t want to admit some chick beat them,”

And while, yes, Maria has heard too many times ‘I didn’t lose that file to just anyone, the Black Widow took it!’ She also knows that there was a time when there _was_ a Black Widow, Russia’s star surveiller, whose identity was never revealed. She also knows that those reports are from the 1960s and 70s. But, she also knows that the woman in their custody is a receiver of the super-soldier serum which, in theory, would halt aging. So, does she sound crazy? Perhaps. Does she _really_ want to have captured the Black Widow? Also yes.

So she asks her straight up, “Are you the Black Widow?”

The woman laughs, “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is,”

But she has that stupid smirk that she’s had all week, where she looks like she knows something no one else does, so Maria asks her again. “Are. You. The. Black. Widow.” 

“I have arachnophobia so I don’t really appreciate this line of questioning.”

Fucking spies. _Fucking spies._ The most annoying people on earth. And Maria has made a career of dealing with them. 

Because, apparently, she loves making things hard for herself. 

So she stays up late that night, searching through file boxes that haven’t been digitized yet. She hates it, even if she sort-of likes the old-timey P.I. feel of it, it's tedious work. She finds reports of a French redhead named Natalie Rushman who was thought to be the Widow for a while but she disappeared. She also had no relatives on file, living or dead, suspicious. 

So Maria went down the Natalie Rushman hole, trying to find more information about her, when she found five women who, between the years of 1959 and 1967, had been in Europe, and had been suspected of being the Widow by one agency or another and were all named variants of Natalie Rushman (Natasha Robinson, Nadia Romaggio, Nikita Romaczak, Nadine Rameau, and Nancy Roman-Medina) which is just a terrible espionage technique. But, when she looked them up on the SHIELD databases she got a hit, an agent in 1963 had been seduced and robbed by ‘Nadia Romaggio’ and he swiped her ID. And in the picture is the woman in their cell. 

Maria shows the ID to Clint. He pales, “She’s the same age as my grandmother,” Maria nods, yes this super-serum is weird, “And I found her hot?” he continues. Maria punches his chest.

She slides the ID card into the Widow’s food slot. Turns off the one-way mirror so she can gloat face-to-face. 

The Widow picks up the ID card, ‘ **Cognome** : Romaggio **Nome** : Nadia **Luogo E Data Di Nascita** : San Gimignano 5.12.42’ it reads. The Widow’s vintage black and white glare is staring back at her.

She smiles a big smile, “Well, you’re quite the little detective,”

Maria scowls, “That’s all you have to say? I found out something that nobody, except the Russian government, knows about you, you’re the _Black Widow_ ”

The Widow turns over the card in her hand, “I’m sorry to break it to you, but every single one of Russia’s allies knows about me. I’m Rossiya’s worst kept secret. They may not know my face, but they know my suit, my hair, my techniques.” She raises an eyebrow, “My results.”

“If that’s the case, why didn’t you tell us who you were in the first place?” Maria asks.

“I didn’t need it as an intimidation tactic and I’m not particularly fond of giving up any information that will render me useless to my captors.”

Maria crosses her arms, “And how are you useless?”

“How exactly do you think you’ll get information out of me? I may be valuable to Russia, but they have other _Soldats_ I am disposable. You should’ve killed me in Greece,”

“SHIELD doesn’t operate that way.”

The Widow snorts, “You don’t kill people?”

Maria stops. Why exactly are they keeping her alive? She’s been loyal to the Russians since they were Soviet, it’s not likely she’d just switch sides. 

But Maria has a _Feeling_. It should be patented or trademarked, actually. Feeling™. Maria’s Feeling™’s are always correct. She was the one who convinced Fury to recruit Barton, the one who convinced him not to nuke that island that one time (Don’t ask), and-

Fury. 

She has not told Nicholas J. Fury anything about this. Clint Barton knew before Fury that they had the espionage world’s most infamous spy in their helicarrier.

Fuck.

\-----------------------

The man stepped in front of the glass and stared at her. The microphone was off, but Natalya could see the man whispering to the _pizda_ , Maria. 

She knew who the man was, Nicholas Joseph Fury. Born 1948. Ex-CIA, former SHIELD lackey until his promotion in 1995. Director of SHIELD since 2005. 

“So, what’s your name?” He asked.

Natalya stepped closer to the glass, “Nina Romaine.”

“Except that it’s not.”

“No, Nicholas Joseph, it’s not,”

He laughs to Maria, “Is that-Is that some sort of intimidation tactic,” he wheezes, “Oh nooo, she knows my name! The horror,” He waves his fingers in a ‘spooky’ way.

Maria laughs back.

Natalya wants to punch them both in the teeth.

“Well, Nina, Nadia, Natalie, Natasha, whatever, you’re going to answer some questions,”

Maria whispers something to Fury. He claps his hands together, “Well! Natasha,”

Natalya tenses. 

“I bet you’re wondering ‘how did he know?’ well, your vitals are being monitored at all times, meaning that we could see the way your heartbeat ticked in recognition to your name. Though, according to my second-in-command, Natasha is a nickname for Natalya. Is that your name, Widow, Natalya?”

Maria whispers to him.

“Wow you did _not_ like that. Natalya it is. Natalya tell me, why did the Russian government want what was on that chip?”

Natalya laughs. “If you don’t know that means you can get into it,”

Fury’s eyebrows crease.

“It’s child pornography.” He replies.

Natasha blinks. “No. It’s not,”

“We have the tape,”

“That’s not what’s supposed to be on there. It’s a trai...oh,” she puts her hands over her mouth.

Of course. _Training video_.

“So you’re familiar with what’s on the tape?”

“I didn’t know that they filmed it, but yes,” Fury gives her a look.

“And you still want to fight for your country?”

“It’s a beautiful place,” She replies, in a bit of a daze.

“Why would they want this back? It doesn’t implicate anybody,”

“I imagine they don’t want anything getting out. Russia is sealed tight,” She’s not looking at him, her fingers are feathering over her face.

“Why are you protecting the people that manufactured this, Natalya?” Her eyes snap back to him. 

“Why do you presume that this would make me care about your cause?”

“I assumed you had a soul,” Fury grumbles.

“Well, you know what happens when you assume,” She smiles but it doesn’t reach her eyes. None of her smiles have. But this feels different like she’s unconvinced of it.

“Was that a joke?” Fury raised his eyebrow.

“I joke,” Natalya responds, defensively. She sits, bringing her knees up to her chest. Her feet grounding her on the concrete floor. In this moment of weakness, she reveals herself, Fury wins when she says “Am I on the video?” she’s looking up at him. She looks small and her eyes are wide with hope but her jaw is tight and her brows furrowed.

Fury waits a moment, considering.

“Yes.”  
\-----------------------

Clint comes to see her next.

“I heard,” he clears his throat, “About the, uh”

She’s standing with her back to him, head turned, looking at him over her shoulder. 

She says nothing. 

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry, I guess? I don’t know, I mean I had a shitty childhood but-. I don’t know why I’m here,”

“You’re here because you want to ask why I am still loyal to Russia after they did that to me.”

He stares at her, “Yeah, I mean, I guess,”

She sits on her cot and looks up at him. Her eyes are rimmed with red.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.” He squeaks, “Do you wanna talk about it?” She doesn’t say no.

Clint sits on the floor in front of the glass. A tear is streaming down Natalya’s face. 

“You know that what happened to you isn’t normal, right?”

“It’s not normal.” She sobs, “I didn’t know that until I was 17. I was in Milan, I think, and there was a woman...I killed the man and I realized that that was what had happened to me. And I didn’t understand the rage that I felt. It wasn’t even personal, it wasn’t for me. I just knew in the moment that what was happening to her was wrong. I didn’t even think about it in a personal context until years later,” 

“And now?” he asks, his face softening.

“Now I don’t have a home and I’m going to die in this stupid cell,”

The next day he asks if he can go in her cell. Maria laughs in his face, he doesn’t laugh. She straightens, “She’s one of the most dangerous women on earth,”.

“And I’m SHIELD’s top agent,”

“We tell everyone that,”

He finds out the code. Sorry to Greg in IT. He didn’t deserve to be threatened like that.

The door slides open and the Widow is shocked, “What are you doing in here?”

“I’m here to talk,” He smiles. He hasn’t closed the door yet. 

She knocks him out and escapes.

She makes it outside and then realizes she is not on the ground. She could jump, she has no way of knowing where they are or how high up they are. Enhanced healing can only do so much against being pancaked by the Atlantic.

She’s surrounded. Guns pointed at her, on her knees, hands above her head. She waits for them to shoot. 

They don’t.

\----------------------

“Why am I still alive?” She asks Fury.

“You might not want to ask that if you want to stay that way,” He replies.

\----------------------

Clint visits her often. He sits close to the glass, they don’t talk. Well, she doesn’t.

He asks her questions and waits for her to reply.

After a week of this, she asks “Why do you keep asking questions? I don’t reply and if I did it would all be lies,”

“I don’t believe that,” He answers, “You’re a person, I don’t believe all people can change but I believe that people like you-like us can change. I have to,”

“Maybe we don't need to change, just revert,” She muses.

He looks at her, “I don’t believe in original sin,” She says. 

\----------------------

Fury visits two days later, at Natalya’s request.

She’s pacing in her room, she seems anxious but is covering it with her spy-shtick. 

Fury’s convinced she’s going to open with ‘Mr. Bond’. She doesn’t.

“I have a proposition,” She declares.

“Okay,” 

“I will give you information on where that video comes from, _if_ you let me go,”

“No.”

“The video comes from one of the Russian government’s most covert training facilities. It’s where I came from, no-one else has this information,”

This piques Fury’s interest. “What do they do there? Human experimentation? Or just training? Is there bureaucratic work done?”

“Comme ci, Comme ça” 

“We’ll check it out and if, _if_ the intel is good then you will become a SHIELD agent,”

She laughs, “Why would you want me to joining your little agency, I have no loyalty to you,”

“Humour me,” Fury responds. 

\----------------------

“He wants me to join SHIELD,” She says one night, she’s making the splits look easy as she’s folded over her body stretching her legs.

“I know,” Clint replies.

“What do you think?”

“About?”

“Me joining SHIELD,” She says, torso straightening, she’s looking directly at him. She looks...scared?

“I think you would be a great asset,” Her face falls, “I think that they would treat you a lot better than your government did.” He smiles, “And, I think that I would enjoy working with you,”

She blushes and Clint feels like he has the power to kill God. 

“I don’t know if I can be loyal to SHIELD,”

“Why not?” 

“It goes against everything I’ve done my whole life. I’ve lived a very long life,”

“Well, do you want to spend your long life doing the same thing? Do you want to spend however long you have left here knowing that you didn’t have to be working for the people who hurt you?”

“You’ve hurt me. Fury’s second-hand woman shot me,” She points out.

“To be fair, you were trying to kill us,” 

“I’ve done worse for less, I suppose,”

\----------------------

“These are the coordinates for the Red Room.” She writes them in red marker on the glass, there’s no undoing this now. Her hand shakes as she writes the last digit.

\----------------------

They give her a room on the helicarrier, in the same wing as Clint. 

She’s never had her own room outside of a hotel. She remembers the rows of beds in the basement of the house in the woods. She doesn’t know if she’s ever slept a full night since she left ‘home’. 60 or so years ago. She doesn’t feel like she’s 78. When she thinks about it it makes sense, she’s had a consistent stream of consciousness for 78 years, but she’s 18 years old.

Nothing about her has changed since she was given the serum. Except when she looks at the ID Maria Hill gave her she sees the subtle changes. She looks at Nadia Romaggio and she looks younger. Natalya looks in the mirror and she can see the subtle signs of age. She’s lost some of the fat in her cheeks. She’s gained weight everywhere else. 

They brought back a prototype of her suit when they raided the Red Room. No one was there, they had an informant in SHIELD. They left everything there, though. SHIELD has more on Russia than Russia does.

She put it on. She sees where the suit is tight in ways it wasn’t before. She’s barely eaten since she’s been in SHIELD custody. They probably were feeding her nutrients after the surgery. 

She knows how long she can go without food. She remembers the tests. She remembers the first time she felt starvation, how her legs shook as men were sent in to kill her. How she’d been a child. How she killed them.

She’s been given clothing. It’s painfully basic, blue jeans, black leggings, gray t-shirts, and black turtlenecks. 

She puts on a black turtleneck and black leggings. It looks just like the suit. She takes a deep breath and steps out of her room. 

She steps into a body. Clint is standing outside her door, he steps back “Oh! Hey, I was just going to get you. We have that-”

“-Meeting with Hill and Fury, yes, yes, I know,”

He gives her a look, “Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?” 

“All Boris and Natasha Badenov?”

It’s true, she’s been speaking with her Russian accent. “It’s my first language, I don’t feel the need for you to see the humanity in my any longer, thus I am reverting to my accent,”

“Cool?”

They go into the conference room, the way there filled with lots of glares at Natalya by other agents. Guess they’re not over her trying to kill them. Killing some of them.

The doors slide open, Fury stands at the head of the table and Hill sits to his left. “Natalya,” He greets, “Good to see you,” she sits on the other side of the table, Clint sits next to her. She moves a seat over.

“Natasha.” She corrects, “It’s painful to hear you all pronounce it wrong, just use the diminutive,” It just sounds wrong in their mouths.

“Okay, Natasha. You and Barton have an assignment,” 

She looks at Barton, he looks pleased as punch. Fury continues hashing out the details of the mission, “-watch has something valuable inside of it, what, exactly, we can’t be sure. You’ll find it on the wrist of the PM of Antigua and Barbuda.” 

“And I’m supposed to this with _him_?” Natasha asks, pointing at Clint. “I don't appreciate your tone,” He grumbles. Maria interjects, “Yes you’ll be doing this with Barton, what you’ve seen of him in the field,” she throws a withering stare at Clint, “Is not his best work. He jumped in with very little information, fueled by emotion and stupidity,”

“I resent that, I would add bravery in there too,” Clint crosses his arms and pouts. 

\----------------------

They land in England, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda is there for a gala at some palace or another.

Clint and Natasha are dressed to the nines, Clint in a tuxedo he won’t stop adjusting, Natasha in an emerald green evening dress with a low back. She’s wearing a brown wig as her half-blonde, half-red hair doesn’t exactly blend in. Natasha spots the PM first, he’s talking to a woman. Natasha approaches them, gives the woman a backhanded compliment (You must be _so_ confident to wear a dress that hugs your stomach like that), the PM soon loses interest in the other woman and sets his sights on Natasha. She drinks champagne and giggles when he jokes. She compliments his watch and his eyes light up, “I have a whole collection of them in my room upstairs,” Natash giggles, “As long as you promise that’s all we’ll do,” she teases. He grins. 

Clint watches this and follows them up the stairs. The man closes the door to his room and Natasha has a gun to him. Clint knocks and she yells “Come in!”. The man is crying. Clint takes his watch and they search his room for anything else valuable to SHIELD. 

They roofie him and make their way out the back. It’s a surprisingly seamless operation. That is, until the PM’s men find them in their hotel room.

“How-” Clint grunts as he kicks one of the armed guards in the stomach, sending him crashing into the bathroom mirror.

“Promise you won’t hate me?” Natasha pleads as she elbows a man standing behind her.

“I will make no such promise,” One of the armed guards is knocked out, his leg is totally fucked. “I may or may not have stolen his credit card,” Natasha confesses mid-backflip, “And went shopping while you were sleeping,” the last man goes down as her kick lands.

The five men are strewn about the floor, Clint is glaring at her.

\----------------------

Clint and Natasha have partnered on 3 more missions. They’re a great team. They’re taking some downtime in Brooklyn. Natasha’s only been uptown before.

They’re in a grimy dive bar doing shots of Nikolai. Clint falls off his barstool, Natasha laughs. “I don’t know what made you think you could drink a Russian with an enhanced metabolism under the table but-” she forgets where her sentence is going and opts to laugh instead. 

Clint is crawling on the floor, she picks up under his armpit. “Oh, you little _detka_ ,” She coos at him like a baby and he lazily paws her hands away from his face. He then vomits in the beer pitcher that belongs to the group next to them. Natasha gets them kicked out of the bar.

Clint is leaning on her as she guides them toward his apartment in Bed-Stuy. She has trouble getting the key in the building door and has to drag Clint up the stairs. She opens his apartment door and he flops on the couch murmuring something. She brings him a bucket in case he vomits again and sits on the floor next to the couch. She strokes his sweaty forehead and smiles to herself. He vomits into the bucket. He sits up after a while, beginning to sober and gives Natasha-Nat, as he has taken to calling her-a lopsided grin. She sits next to him on the couch and rests her head on the curve of his neck. He smells like Vodka sweat, it’s terrible. She laughs about this. 

“Whatcha laughing about?” He asks, she looks up at him “I’m laughing ‘cause you’re gross,”

He shoves her. She keeps looking at him, grinning. His face falls and his eyes defog. Nat’s eyes widen, scared something has gone wrong as he leans forward. 

His mouth hits hers. It’s sloppy at first, but he softens. Natalya has kissed many men with alcohol on their breath. None have ever kissed her this way. They always treat her as if she’s not there, as if she’s a doll. Clint brings his hands to her chin and she doesn’t even notice that she’s kissing him back. 

She pulls her head back and looks at him. He looks at her like she’s everything. Only one other man has looked at her like that before. Of course, that time it was sort of true. 

He says something. Natasha shakes her head, “Sorry-what?”

“I asked if you were okay,” He looks concerned.

Natasha considers this, “Yes, I’m okay.” 

She falls asleep on the couch in his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this chapter, if you did feel free to leave a comment and I will attempt to reply. This is going to be part of a larger series surrounding Nat called What is Normal for the Spider, is Chaos for the Fly (the title of which comes from Charles Addams, this work's title comes from Georg Trakl) so stay tuned for that. 
> 
> Oh! the song that she's singing along to in the car! it's[this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8gGqZh-q2s) (title translates to the Ballad of the Red Rider) which I believe is sung by Edward Kihl. Also some of the Russian is sort of fuck-y, like at one point she says blya umeret' which is supposed to mean 'fucking kill' but I'm p sure it actually means 'fuck to kill' which... so suspension of disbelief ig


End file.
